soldiers' lots

in a lot of cemeteries there's one lot set aside for the burial of indigent solders and sailors and sometimes their comrades who wished to be buried among soldiers.

there are two soldier's lots in the ithaca city cemetery and i was on my way back from sort of meeting some people but while i was on my way up looking at mr. fralick and the mintzes (do i need to give you a link at this point?) i thought i'd just stroll by the soldiers' lot on my way back down to my car.

it isn't by any means a careful cataloging; i simply don't have the time or inclination to research the full biography or even the service record of every veteran whose grave i pass.

and yet i wish to recognize something about each of these people and take a moment to notice that they once walked the earth and breathed like me.

so a representative sample, then. i will pick some at random and call their names and learn a little of their time on this earth.

i'm struggling at the moment organizing my thoughts about this handful of men from the two soldiers' lots. it's different, looking at civil war graves not from vermont. vermont men mostly served with the vermont regiments. our men mostly went into regiments that fed the two vermont infantry brigades.

in our hill cemeteries our civil war veterans for the most part served in vermont brigades and that's that.

in the ithaca city cemetery, they were local boys serving new york regiments mostly, but more so here than in the smaller central new york towns, the civil war veterans served so many units! they were cavalry, a bunch of them. and they fought with units from wisconsin and massachusetts. and they served in colored units, both infantry and cavalry.

they're all dead the same, though.

civil war:

6th NY heavy artillery:

SWARTWOUT, AUGUSTUS J. — Private, Fourteenth Artillery;
transferred to Co. B, Sixth Artillery, May 10, 1864; wounded,
July 30, 1864, in front of Petersburg, Va.; discharged for disability, June 6, 1S65, at Satter









2d NY cavalry (provisional):

BROWER, WILLIAM H. ~ Age, I8 years. Enlisted, September
16,1863, at Ithaca; mustered in as private, Go. K, Fifteenth New
York Cavalry, October 3,1863, to serve three years; transferred
to Co. G, October, 1863; transferred, June 17, 1865, to Co. G,
this regiment; mustered out, September 8, 1865, at Elmira,
N. Y.







5th NY cavalary:

CULVER , LEWIS I [sic].—Age, 21 years. Enlisted, August 17,
1864, at Lisle; mustered in as private, Co. O, August 17,
1861, to serve one year; wounded twice; mustered out with
detachment, June 15, 1865, at Staunton, Va









21st NY cavalry:

STEVENS, CHARLES.—Age, 29 years. Enlisted, December 30,
1863, at Dryden; mustered in as private, Co. F, December 30,
1863, to serve three years; transferred, September 9, 1865, to
Co. G; mustered out with company, June 29, 1866, at Denver,
Colorado Territory.








1st NY dragoons:
CRAWFORD , HENRY.—Age , 44 years. Enlisted, July 26, 1862,
at Mount Morris, N . Y. ; mustered in as private, Co. B, August
8,1862, to serve three years; mustered out with company, June
30,1865, at Clouds Mills, Va. ; also borne as Henry Crouford.


AGED VETERAN DIES. 
Henry Crawford Saw Service With
the First Regiment of New York
Volunteers—lifelong Resident.
Henry Crawford, a long-time restdent of Ithaca and a veteran of the
Civil war, died Saturday, aged. 83
years. He whs a member of Company B, First regiment, New York
State Volunteers.
He is survived by one daughter,
Mrs. William M. Seamon of No. 307
East Tompkins- street. Death was
the result oif complications due to advanced age.
The funeral will probably be held
from Mrs. Seamon's residence.

5th MA cavalry (colored):

price, adam

The home of Adam Price at No.
 114 Fifth street was partially destroyed by fire shortly after 6 o'clock
yesterday afternoon (ithaca daily news, september 15, 1900)

Davjd Barnard. Riley Updike. arid
Adam Price returned  this morning
from the G. A. R. encampment at
Washington. Emerson Spicer of Trumansbarg also returned . with the
party. The quartet, by leaving Washington ahead of the regular scedule
avoided the crush of the regular trains (ithaca daily news, october 1902)

VETERANS OF CIVIL WAR
RECALL LEE'S SURRENDER (ithaca daily news, april 1905)

—A special meeting of Sidney post
G. A. R. will be held at 8 o'clock tonight to make arrangements to attend'
the funeral of the late Adam Price (ithaca daily news, october 4, 1905)

The funeral of Adam Price was
held today at 3 o'clock, the Rev. T.
A. Auten officiating.' Sydney post, GAR
attended in a body and gave a
flower banner in the colors of the
 American flag. The Masonic order
sent a wreath and the colored band
an anchor. (ithaca daily news, october 6, 1905)


11th PA cavalry:

Thompkins, William, Private,
Captured at Petersburg, Va., June 9, 1864; discharged by General Order, June 21, 1865; Vet










1st wisconsin cavalry:

Miller, Hiram H discharged may 27 1865

32d NY infantry:

WHITE , THOMAS.—Age, 21 years. Enlisted, May 7, 1861, at • 
Ithaca, to serve two years; mustered in as private, Oo. I, May 
31, 1861; mustered out with company, June 9, 1863, at New 
York city, as Thomas B. White. 

Memorial Services Held at the First
M. E. Church -Addresses of
Rev. W.H.York and Col. 
T. B. White. (ithaca daily news, january 30, 1890)

OLD SOLDIERS WILL TAKE A HAND (oswego daily times, october 18, 1890)

GOOD BYE THOMAS!
For some- time it has beln reported
around this city that "Colonel" Thomas
B. White has been threatening to desert
the republican party (oswego daily times, october 24, 1891)

Col. White in Syracuse.
Attorney Thomas B. White, formerly J>fcthis eityvaddressed a meeting
of the Builders'and Traders' Exchange,
Syracuse, last evening. The subject
upon which Colonel White talked interestingly was: "The Builder, the
Builded and the Lien Law." Colonel
White is now a resident of Syracuse (oswego daily palladium, april 30, 1892)

In his place
Colonel Thomas B. White, of Ithaca, was
secured. Colonel White is In magnificent
voice, and with tears In his eyes told of
the passing away of many veterans who
had formerly gathered at the encampment. (rochester democrat and chronicle, august 21, 1901)

COL. WHITE POPULAR. 
Well-known llhaca Orator Warmly
Greeted At 8odas EncampmentNoted As A Speaker. (ithaca daily news, august 20, 1902)

Colonel Thomas B, White. 
Ithaca, N. Y , Dec. 27.—Colonel Thomas
Benton White, a veteran of the Civil war,
died to-day, aged 6o. He enlisted when the
war broke out and at the age of [unreadable] was
breveted colonel for bravery. Colonel White
was a lawyer and had practiced ia Oswego
and syracuse. He was well known throughout the state aa a Republican orator. (rochester democrat and chronicle, december 28, 1902)


65th NY infantry:
SIMPSON , DECATUR. — Age, 30 years. Enlisted at Ithaca,
to serve three years, and mustered in as private, Co. D, July
20, 1861; promoted corporal, October, 1861; returned to ranks,
no date; re-enlisted as a veteran, December 26, 1863; transferred to Co. F, September 1, 1864; mustered out with company, July 17, 1865, at Halls Hill, Va.

Decatur Simpson got drunk on the 8th
October, was in the lockup over Sunday
and fined ten dollars ou Monday.  (the local democrat, november 1857)

OBITUARY. 
Decatur Simpson.
Decatur Simpson, a veteran of the
Civil War, died at the residence of
David Letts on Brindley Street at noon
today. He leaves a nephew, Thaddeus
Stevens of Syracuse. The funeral will
be held at the Inlet Mission at 2
o'clock Tuesday afternoon. Burial will
be in the City Cemetery. (ithaca daily news, january 30, 1909)

97th NY infantry:

PERRY , ELI—Age , 28 years. Enlisted at Hornby, to serve
three years, and mustered in as private, Co. B, July 17, 1863;
mustered out with company, July 18, 1865, near Washington,
D. C.









143d NY infantry:
STEVENS, LEWIS.—Age , 31 years. Enlisted, August 16, 1862,
at Ithaca, to serve three years; mustered in as private, Co. D,
October 8, 1862; mustered out with company, July 20, 1865, at
Washington, D. C.










179th Ny infantry:

RYERSON , JAMES C—Age, 26 years. Enlisted, August 13,
1864,, at Ithaca, to serve one year; mustered in as private, Co. 
I, September 13, 1864; mustered out with company, June 8,
1865, near Alexandria, Va.








8th regiment, United States Colored Troop:

sylvester suzey, Substitute; mustered out with Company, November 10, 1865

Help Tommy Ray!  (geneva gazette 1894)

—Vet Suzey had fourteen chickens
stolen from his coop last Saturday night. (ithaca daily news, decemer 16, 1899)

—Vet Suzey fell from a step ladder
yesterday afternoon while washing the
ceiling in the Windsor cafe on North
Cayuga street. He landed squarely on
his head but was not seriously hart. He
said to a reporter that if he had struck
his shins there would have been one lets
"coon" in the city. (ithaca daily news january 24, 1900)

DEBATE ON NEGRO PROBLEM. 
THIRTY NEW MEMBERS
A lively debate was held last evening at the A. M. E. Zion chutch on
the question, "Resolved, That the negro of this country should migrate to
Africa."
The debaters -were the Messrs.
Suzey and Green-for the affirmative,
against Messrs. Woodson and Terry,
who supported the negative. They
manifested their convictions in an interesting and entertaining manner.
The judges declared the debate a
draw, much to the satisfaction ot the
audience. (ithaca daily news, may 1904)

i wonder why mr. suzey, an owner of property and involved member of his community would debate the affirmative in sending black people "back" to africa, but the more clippings i read, the more obvious it becomes that mr. suzey is accomplished in debate and is called upon to speak at many organized adjudicated events.

DEBATE ARRANGED. 
Colored Orators Will Argue Question
at Catholic Fair Tonight—Man
Valuable Prizes Awarded (ithaca daily news 1904)

Sylvester T.Suzey. 
Sylvester Thomas Suzey, Colored,
familiarly known as '.'Vet," died at
his home, 119 Wheat street, at 7 am.
 from general debility. He Was 73
ysars' of age, and had lived In this
city for 40 years.
Suzey was a member of-Company
B, Eighth regiment of colored troops
in the Civil war. He is survived by
his wife, Lucy, and oaf daughter,
Mrs. Niola Whitley of Boise, Idaho.
The funeral will be held Monday
afternoon at 3 o'clock (ithaca daily new january 11, 1908)

Obituary. 
Sylvester T. Suzey.
The funeral of Sylvester T. Suzey
was held this afternoon from his residence in Wheat street, and later from
the A. M. B, Zion church,, the Rev. T.
A. Auten officiating. Interment was
made in the City cemetery. (ithaca daily news, january 13, 1908)




26th Regiment, United States Colored Troops:

Waters, William

SIDE:Union

COMPANY:K
SOLDIER'S RANK IN:Private

SOLDIER'S RANK OUT:Private

AFRICAN AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MEMORIALDISPLAYED AS:William Waters 

PLAQUE NUMBER:B-42

WWI:

11th infantry division, 11th sanitary train

claude d. schrauger

this division got all trained and equipped and had its orders to go to europe but then the armistice was signed.

77th infantry division, 302d ammunition train:

Morris Cornell has returned, honorably discharged from overseas service. (ithaca daily news,june 2, 1919)


there is little record of mr. cornell, but there is a great collection of letters from another man in his unit and if you want to have an idea what his service was like, i recommend you go read those.












and last:


OLD SOLDIERS PAY 
TRIBUTE TO DEAD 

fold up the banners
smelt the guns
love rules.

life in clippings: summing up

i know, you never thought i'd get to this point.

when i started, i thought it was going to be one or two posts about a guy and maybe a little about his relations.

and then it turned into a STUDY.

so a word about scope and methods, in case you are interested in this sort of thing.

since my objective was simply to tell some of the story of lawrence m. mintz, i'm not obliged to find every source nor to track down every detail as would someone writing a biography or a full historical account.

i made a choice early on to use for my sources clippings from newspapers and other publications like city directories and alumni newsletters. where necessary to establish family connections i did use grave registry and census data, but i limited my searches to information that is available for free online. not "free with your trial offer", but free.

most of that information is housed in its digital forms at old fulton post cards, the tompkins county public library, and cornell university.

if you're just coming in now and want to follow the relevant posts in this blog, they are here:

• life in clippings: the mintzes of ithaca
• life in clippings: ben mintz, inc.
• life in clippings: what the mintzes are doing
• life in clippings: why?
• life in clippings: everyday antisemitism
• life in clippings: what the....?
• life in clippings: joinery
• life in clippings: the mintzes in military service
• life in clippings: name changes and sloppy census work
• life in clippings: loose ends and odd bits

it's hard to make gerealizations about the mintzes of ithaca. there were a lot of them, and they had a lot of ties to family in nearby cities. the clothing store and the house on west seneca streeet are a focal point for them, but so is cornell university. here's my map of the ithaca locations of the mintz family:



View the mintzes of ithaca in a larger map

they are a people of means, and a people of education. they all of them, even the girls of that first generation, graduate from high school. not all of them go to college, but a large percentage of them do.
of those who go to college, a great majority of them go to cornell university.




they are skilled verbally; they end up in careers that require them to communicate well. the mintzes are largely salesmen, journalists, teachers, or attorneys.




they sing and participate in theater. they are part of pageants and programs and get cast as extras in early films. if there is an extravaganza going on, the mintzes are in it. if there's a convention train, a mintz will be leading the singing.

but they are sportsmen and sports fans, as well. they are involved with track and baseball and football. they go to regattas and they go camping.

the mintzes are heavily involved in democratic party politics, but they are also present in a number of civic and fraternal organizations. they chair committees. they captain fund drives.

if they are not larger than life, they are as large as life. they are out in the world and the rough and tumble of politics and living and when they go to parties, it is noted in the newspapers.

that is awesome.

here's a timeline of some of the events of the mintz family, taken from the newspapers:





and here's the hard part: their family tree, as best as i can construct it.



you can have a look at the whole tree in this embedded chart, and you should probably hide the sidebar to do it. if you want to see the whole thing more easily, it's here.

i still can't prove that harry of binghamton is ben's half brother by his father's second wife, but i still think that's how they are related. i know that anna mintz is related somehow, and probably closely, but i cannot find how exactly. there is a louis hurwitz of syracuse who i know to be a cousin of ben, but i have dead ended looking for how he fits in. once again, he's a close relation because he shows up in the clippings a lot. he is maybe related to ben's mother? whose name i don't know?

the more you know, the more questions you have.

life in clippings: loose ends and odd bits

as much as i've tried to put together some kind of neat thread of the story, there are things i have clues about, but no solutions.

i think ben's father married twice and that his father's second wife is rachel of binghamton, but to really know for sure i have to dig in more records than i'm ready to dig through.

i know that louis hurwitz is a cousin of ben, and accounts suggest he is part of the syracuse family, and quite frankly, tracking mintz relatives who are not carrying the mintz name is just a bit trickier, plus it's syracuse, which has a larger population and is also therefore harder to search.

likewise, i believe the anna mintz in the news items is associated with louis's household, but they are hard to track once louis moves with part of the family to newark, nj. this is partly because louis dies in 1917, and partly because it's harder to get newark records online.

the ithaca daily news reports that mabel, louis's daughter, is injured in the newark trolley disaster, but there's no corroborating source. there are no newark articles i can find that place her among the injured.

there are accounts of the lawsuit surrounding hiram's will in which both the (alleged) common law wife (interloper!) and aaron's daughter, hiram's (great?) niece each claim part of the estate. i have not been able to find records of how that was settled.

i sort of thought "it's a shame they have a family dispute that comes to lawyer involvement", but really and truly, any CONVERSATION in the family is likely to involve lawyers.

because lawyers.

and ben's half-brother brother harry is an interesting guy in his own right.

for starters, while he's at hamilton college he goes ahead and wins the 1901 clark prize for his oration "israel in history", which gets limited press.

when maurice b. rich subsequently delivers the same address at brown university commencement in 1903 it is received so well that it wins mr. rich the gaston medal and some additional press coverage.

then at some point harry goes out west "for health reasons" to live among the cheyenne and when he returns home he gives a lot of lectures to bemused audiences about the humanity and dignity of the american indian.

i am not kidding about this.

there is a cheerful racism in american culture of this time by which white people feel it is totally appropriate to take for themselves native cultural identity and "improve" upon it, notably by excluding "red" men from clubs in which white men pretend to be the inheritors of native culture.

and harry goes to these gatherings and gives lectures at which amused and disbelieving audiences hear him tell them that the american indians aren't actually savages, but people.

what? they have a sense of humor?
what? they marry and have families?

disbelieving american white audiences are amazed! how exotic! how newsworthy!

and while we're on the binghamton mintzes, i have seen some evidence that they are republicans! imagine the family drama at THAT thanksgiving table!

and this is totally not an important detail, but it is a detail i like: the ithaca mintzes apparently like to play cards.

life in clippings: name changes and sloppy census work

if you've ever looked up people in the US censuses (censes?) of the late 19th century you will notice that census workers did not appear to have practiced especial diligence in writing properly the names of poor people and immigrants.

operating here is both the idea that it just isn't that important to be certain of the proper names and spellings, but also that it may have been difficult to understand the heavily accented speech of new immigrants.

there are also the twin problems of nonstandard spellings and name changes.

standard spellings are a relatively new thing in written language, if they ever even really arrived at all. so a person may have spelled his or her own name several ways over the course of a life or even an afternoon.

and an immigrant may over time change the spelling of a perfectly good name just to make it more pronounceable in the new home country.

with the mintzes how they are named in the census contributes a little to the picture, so i want to tell you about it.

in the 1880 US census, ben's wife is given as "fanny r. mintz", but in the 1900 census she is "rachel f. mintz". the 1905 new york state census lists her as "racheal mintz", and  by the 1910 US census she's "rachel mintz"

i think she makes the shift from "fanny" to "rachel" to reflect her growing maturity and dignity in the world. her preferred form of adress seems to be "mrs. ben mintz", and that's how she appears in nearly every print mention, even after she is widowed.

the children's names as the census years pass reflect both the growth of the family and sometimes their outgrowing of baby names.

here's the listing of the children according to census year:

• 1880 - ettie, harry
• 1900 - ester, aaron, jacob, gussie, lawrence, leinl
• 1905 - esther, jay, gustave, lawrence, lionel
• 1910 - etta, gus, lawrence, lionel
• 1920 - esther, august, terrence

huh? terrence? 

sloppy work. that's just lawrence. you can see the children grow up and move out in the list. you can't see ruby here at all and if we didn't have her headstone, we wouldn't know her name at all. and somewhere in a census form it is reported that rachel is the mother of nine, but seven children survive. i am guessing it is probably true that there are two infants who do not even make it onto the census lists.

esther seems to go by the name "etta", or "miss etta mintz" until the day she dies.

jay is a bit of a mystery to me. he may actually be named jacob, but his name is given in various sources as "jacob", jay", "jay jerome", "j. jerome", jerome", "jerome jay", "jerome j.", and "j.j.". additionally, while we can trace his year of graduation from cornell and some of his employment, he is the child of whom comparatively nothing is written.

he wants, i think, to be hidden from view either because he is the odd man out in this family or this town or because he is a private person and does not wish to have his comings and goings listed in the social pages.

they are both plausible explanations.  his many shifts of name suggest to me that he is maybe not entirely comfortable in one persona, maybe not entirely comfortable in his own skin. 

he seems to have been be a successful adult, so i hope at least he was happy.

time to make fun of the robocommenters

robocommenting is big business. it is part of the grey and black hat operations of dubious little people selling SEO packages to dubious little people or with dubious little businesses and what they NEED is a lot of backlinks or to find patsies who will link farm or link exchange and what they need is for YOU, little blogger, to keep their comment on your blog so that their link is out there, because somebody's paying by the link or the view.

yeah, it would be awesome if everybody all at once got interested in my youtube videos i guess, but there's little point in buying "views" which aren't any more than a lot of clickthroughs.

i mean, really. are you telling a story here, or do you just want to show how much other people are willing to click on your link?

nevermind.

i know the answer to that.

anyway, manipulative crap meant to take advantage of people with low self-esteem or low intelligence kind of burns my butt, and you see a lont of that crap in the robocomments.

the process works like this: some shady little person who wants a lot of clickthroughs for their get-rich-quick scheme pays x amount of dollars to a black hat SEO outfit that offers bazillions of views or clickthroughs or backlinks for a price.

then the blackhatter whips up a couple of generic comments that are meant to sound like real people and they use bots or low-paid labor to paste their spam comments to a lot of blogs hoping that good natured people will allow those comments onto their blogs.

you might could just filter and delete them, but i don't. i read them, because i am fascinated by the way they try to capitalize on people's vulnerabilities.

so let's take a look at some classic stuff i've been saving, shall we?

Wow, fantastic blog layout! How lengthy have you been running a blog for? you make blogging glance easy. The total glance of your website is magnificent, as well as the content material! Feel free to visit my homepage; 

this is the generic "wow, i love your layout!" it has a popular variant that goes something like "wow, this layout is almost exactly the layout of my old blog!"

the layout of my blog is a standard blogger template with some minor adjustments. but thanks.

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i'm so glad to be useful to you.  i am kind of puzzled why you consider this post to be "helpful information", but whatever.

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educational. well, that's not really a thing i would expect, but it's your education so i guess you'd know.

and i guess some people are just really, really stupid:

You really make it seem so easy with your presentation but I find this topic to be really something which I think I would never understand. It seems too complicated and extremely broad for me. I am looking forward for your next post, I will try to get the hang of it! My blog post 

you keep trying. i'm sure you will eventually come to understand pudding. i know it's a struggle, but it will be worthwhile for you to gain mastery of it in the end.

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huh. if my description of the pond skimming is reading your thoughts, i have worries about you. come to think of it, you comment is slightly less coherent than a simple bad translation of a foreign language spam, so what exactly ARE your thoughts? and what's the deal with the omegas instead of w's?  is that some sort of way for you to sign your scuzzy work?

and then i noticed that some robospams are getting hostile, because apparently they think criticizing people's work will get responses and backlinks:

I think that what you composed was actually very reasonable. But, consider this, what if you added a little content? I mean, I don't want to tell you how to run your blog, but suppose you added something that grabbed people's attention? I mean "how to make awesome pudding" is a little plain. You should look at Yahoo's home page and watch how they create news headlines to grab viewers interested. You might add a video or a picture or two to grab readers interested about everything've got to say. In my opinion, it could make your posts a little livelier. My site :

mmmhm. yes, what if i added a little content? i have been thinking just that thing. flask, i says to myself: maybe you should put a little content in here and maybe be more like yahoo's home page, because that's all FULL of content and not linkbait and spam and cheap advertising. i am so glad this commenter stopped to put me on the right track, because with all of these posts and no content i was starting to wonder what the purpose of the exercise is. thank you, oh, THANK you spambot commenter, for showing me what i was missing from my content-empty blog!

and this, designed, i guess, to rile up the commenters while not saying anything specific:

I drop a comment each time I like a post on a website or I have something to contribute to the conversation. It is triggered by the passion displayed in the article I looked at. And after this post "how to make awesome pudding". I was actually moved enough to post a thought :-) I actually do have a couple of questions for you if you do not mind. Could it be only me or does it look as if like some of the comments appear like left by brain dead visitors? :-P And, if you are posting on other online social sites, I'd like to follow you. Could you make a list every one of all your communal sites like your twitter feed, Facebook page or linkedin profile? Here is my web-site -

my, but don't you sound all casual and friendly! it's like the two of us are in here together against ALL THESE LUNATICS. clearly we have a special bond.

and then there's this, and a lot like it:

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huh?

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and whut?

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*blinks eyes*

and finally:

Howdy, i read your blog from time to time and i own a similar one and i was just wondering if you get a lot of spam remarks? If so how do you stop it, any plugin or anything you can advise? I get so much lately it's driving me insane so any help is very much appreciated. Feel free to surf to my page

really? you have a blog similar to mine? because mine covers a pretty small niche, namely THINGS I AM THINKING ABOUT. but yes, now that you mention it, i do get a lot of spam remarks. i think one of the best ways for me not to get so many spam remarks would be for you not to write them.

and no, i will not be surfing over to your webpage, even though i feel free to do so. my webpage: http://furthermoreflask.blogspot.com/

living descendants

i am not yet down writing about the mintzes.  i'm mostly done, but i'm wrapping up the details of my picture of who they were.

you know, because i happened to have been walking by that one grave on a saturday afternoon.

but that one guy wasn't a tidy little picture. THERE WAS A TON OF STUFF TO READ! and as i kept learning about the family, i kept having questions.

and if you can't for instance, figure out where jay went after he graduated from cornell or how exactly harry is related to ben, you just start pushing outward on the things you DO know, looking for clues.

and the clues i found led me right to living descendants of lawrence and lionel. original ben.

i wrote to them best i could. had to log into facebook to do it.

hi, i'm a total stranger and i have spent two weeks of my life researching your family, just for giggles. if these are your people, please write back. i want to share with you what i know.

i don't know if they will think i am a crackpot or a blackmailer or a genealogy-for-hire cold caller or what, but at this point i probably know more than any person living on this planet about this particular branch of their family and i believe they ought to have all the links to the files and the junior sleuthing i did because they're kin.


i have not heard from them yet.

hope.

it's about the cheese

last month i think i mentioned that i'd gotten the breakfast burrito at good to go, a market in trumansburg. i got it because the nice young woman at the counter said it was good.

and it was.

but i was noticing that they have all kinda good things there, including some very nice looking local cheeses and if you've known me for more than a day you know i like cheese.

there's a guy buying one of the local cheeses and i ask him a few questions about its pungency and staying power which are the sort of thing you want to know if you're living in your car and do not have a refrigerator.

and here's a thing about local people: when you start asking questions about products made locally, they are usually very happy to tell you just what's good and what you should not miss. it's like that pretty much everywhere you travel.

and the people in the store had a number of cheese recommendations for me, and also told me that the cheese counter at the shur-fine has a DIFFERENT selection of good local cheese.

really? the shur-fine?

yep.

the shur-fine is not the brightest or most up-to-date of grocery stores and its selection is limited but by golly they have a whole case devoted to fine local cheese.

i put that information on my list.

but then i happen to be coming back through trumansburg in the afternoon on a wednesday which is AWESOME because i had so far missed being in trumansburg on wednesday afternoons and that's when they have the farmer's market.

and it turns out the farmer who makes that cheese i was asking about at the store is there selling her cheeses and i thought i'd just pick one up direct from the farmer because awesome.

i bought one and went off happy and whistling, knowing that it would keep (properly stored) until i was good and ready to eat it.

now, i am nearly always ready to eat cheese, but when the cheese is nice, i like to be ready for it. ready means i can store unused portions properly. ready means i will have opportunities to finish the cheese while it's still at its practical best.

fast forward to last week.


it was a kenton bianco and i didn't do anything fancy with it. i ate a couple of slices plain, just because. mostly i ate them the way i like to eat brie: on toast with my homemade feral apple jam.

the one cheese lasted me about four days. the first day it was light and relatively firm and quite lovely. it matured a little each day and by the last day it was creamier and more flavorful, but oddly not more pungent. sometimes a soft-ripened cheese gets decidedly stinkier over some days. depending on the particular cheese, more stinkier is better, or it's not. it depends largely on how much you enjoy any one cheese's signature stink.

this kenton bianco got more complex flavors, but not stronger flavors, if that makes sense to you. by that last day it was a cheese i would have elbowed you out of the way to get more of.

life in clippings: the mintzes in military service

this whole thing for me started with lawrence.

LAWRENCE M.
MINTZ
-
NEW YORK
-
2 LIEUT. INFANTRY
JUNE 29, 1889
APRIL 14, 1944


his headstone doesn't say he was a judge. his headstone says he was a second lieutenant.

he graduated from cornell university in 1911 and very soon after he received word  that he had been "designated by the state department to try examinations in Washintgon on Jan. 29, which, if passed, will make him eligible for appointment to a position in the consular service. "

this is front page news. his return from washington in 1912 following the exam is also reported, although i have seen no record of the result. in 1915 he is practicing law in ithaca.

about a month after president wilson announced the breaking of diplomatic ties with germany, he enlisted in the army. it is worth reading the newspaper account of his service record. most of the news items that exist about him talk of his appearance in ithaca with a recruiter, or his furloughs while he was still stateside, or his promotions.

there is little evidence he spoke much about his combat service with the 108th ny infantry, and you don't have to read too much of the regimental history to know more than maybe you want to know. there's a book kind of like a yearbook of this unit from 1918, and on page 27 you can find a little picture of color sergeant lawrence m. mintz. i'm going to encourage you to go to the digitized copy of the whole document and look at the faces of those men.

just because.


lionel was the baby of the family. he was a singer, a storyteller, and  a comedian. he was a frequent performer on local stages, and if a group of people went on an outing, he led a great deal of the singing. in high school he started a fraternity and got elected captain of the football team. out of high school, he was a volunteer fireman, and commissioner of the city baseball league.

he was such a large and flamboyant personality that newspapers even reported RUMORS about him, which then had to be retracted.

in march of 1918 he reported for duty to camp upton for radio classes with the 321st field signal battalion.

now, the actual service record of this unit is a bit of a mystery to me. there is a great deal of news from them while they are in training at camp upton, and a lovely photo of one of their radio training classrooms.

there is a news account that the unit has arrived in france, but after that, there is simply nothing i can find until the point at which they are shipped home.

i am going to assume, based on the mountain of information i have read about signal battalions in WWI europe in general that they did actually did do some stuff, but that the record of what they did may not be digitized and online.

that's kind of a key concept when you are researching historical events from old newspapers and obscure books: it used to be you had to track down everything and GO TO THE LIBRARIES and sit for hours with unindexed copies and nowadays anyone like me can just sit online and search (granted, you have to be good with search) the digitized copies.

but digitizing those copies is slow work, and while every day more and more of these records are available for public use, a great deal of it is simply hidden.

anyway, i'm assuming that lionel and his unit did some stuff.

in 1919 once he was stateside he did a series of big patriotic town meetings where he and two other guys who'd fought in europe, a latin professor (why?) and a musical ensemble made a tour of finger lakes towns telling people about it.

when gustave enlists it's a big enough deal to be covered in the paper, but it's already june of 1918. those three months between march and june make a big difference in how your war goes.

here is a thing i learned while working on this post: the gears of the great machine bringing american men into the army and getting them trained move so slowly that many of american men who enlist and train for world war I never actually get shipped out.

what i know for sure is that gustave shipped to washington for engineer training at camp a.a. humphreys and that of the ten regiments of replacement engineers authorized, only five were ever trained. i have record that the "first quota" (however many men that is)  was shipped to france and that shipments continued until armistice, but i have not yet seen any indication if gusatve is among those sent to france, or among those who were at home getting ready to ship to france when the war ended.

i am taking a flying guess based on gustave's popularity among the men of the ithaca chapter of the newly chartered american legion that he did manage to serve in france.

in any case,  when the ithaca daily news runs a full-page spread naming all the "The Boys From Tompkins County Who Did Their Share in the World War to Help Keep the Huns From Destroying Civilization", all three brothers ore on the list.

in the next generation, lawrence's son ben graduated from cornell in 1943 and reported to field artillery replacement training at fort bragg. it is possible that he served with the 690th field artilery battalion in europe and may have been be the author of a small (31 pages) volume titled From normandy to leipzig, the 690th Field artillery Battalion.

that volume was written by a ben e. mintz under supervision of a US army officer but -and this is a big "but"- the volume is in german, published in leipzig.

still, it may only be an excerpt of the army's own history of the battalion, one chapetr of which is titled, oddly, From normandy to leipzig, the 690th Field artillery Battalion.

OUR ben e. mintz, we know, served in europe in a field artillery unit. we also know he could write, so it's not a huge leap of imagination to think that he may have been one of the junior officers that wrote up reports.

he was discharged in 1946 a captain and returned to cornell to work in ints athletic department, eventually becoming the director of publicity for cornell athetics and being named to cornell's hall of fame.

meanwhile, aaron's son edward  (cornell AB 1931) was commissioned a 2d lieutenant in the army air corps in 1942 and was stationed at mitchel field. there's rather a lot written about his service in the CBI theater, which involved legal, insurance and disposition work with aircraft.

oh, and intelligence work.

they don't hardly mention the intelligence work, but talk a lot about insurance.

because he was an insurance salesman.

yeah, there was a little thing about being a lawyer and all that, but insurance.

and if you have the time and inclination and want to know a lot more about him and his service, you can inquire at the air force historical research agency or the library of congress.

product placement

we need to have this talk because last last month i bought a cheese and very soon i will be telling you how very, very much i enjoyed it.

because the whole point of this blog is to tell you about stuff i'm thinking about or stuff i'm doing or whatever i'm interested in, sometimes that will involve products or services that are for sale.

i just need to make it clear that when i'm talking about somebody's business or their product, it's because i have something i want to say about it. i am not paid for these commentaries, not in money or in samples and quite frankly some of those companies would probably just as well i not mention them.

i need you to know that if the day ever comes that i am shilling for a product because i am receiving some sort of compensation, i will tell you right up front because i don't believe it's inherently immoral for a company to offer compensation for people to write about their products.

here are my rules (like it's ever going to be an issue, right?):

if i am reviewing a product because i have been asked to, i will say so.

if i am reviewing a product and i have received any of it without cost to me, i will say so.

if i am affiliated with the business, i will say so.

and if they out-and-out pay me to write good things about product, i will label it as paid advertising.

i do not imagine this is ever going to be an issue, but it's good to have rules right up front.

if we're going to talk about full disclosure, though, i do go on and on about how much i like riding at my local mountain bike venue, and for some years now i have paid for my membership by assorted services. mostly my job is to ride around in uniform and help people find trails they will enjoy riding. i also check to see if people have trail passes.

there's my disclosure.

later on i will talk about cheese.

you know, because it's awesome cheese.

life in clippings: joinery

i'm about to wrap up my study of the mintzes of ithaca.

you know that awkward stage in a relationship where you're just falling in love with a whole group of people who have been dead for a few decades and at first blush everything they do is fantastic but then you start to notice the little things about them, like their family fights and it's a little embarrassing but then you realize they're just regular people like you and you think it's cute when they have spinach in their teeth?

i think i'm done finding all the information i'm going to find, and i'm trying to tie the bits of news into some data you can look at.


i have a lot of information about the mintzes and their affiliations with various organizations, and i have been thinking for some days how to make a graphic representation that shows the sheer volume of their affiliations and memberships.

the mintzes are joiners. they join civic and service clubs, professional and alumni associations, fund raising drives, sports clubs, and political parties.

where there exist insufficient clubs for them to join, they found new ones.

they go right ahead and join the military if there's a need, and i think i want to devote a whole post to that.

(i know, right? i swear, at some point i'm going to stop blogging about the mintzes and post about some civil war soldiers whose graves i found on my way BACK from the party that saturday afternoon because when all is said and done what this blog is really about is telling the story of where i am, what i'm doing, and what i'm thinking about. and right now what i am thinking about is some people who are buried in a place where i happened to see them and wonder what i could find out about their lives. you know. like you do.)

all right, so i've been going back and forth about how to represent the data about organizational affiliations. i keep making charts and tables and then as i move data in, it looks very flat and what i am concluding is that not all information is interesting when you look at it in a graphic representation.

so i've settled on just listing anecdotally the organizations the mintzes belonged to or worked with.

etta was a member of the choir at the first presbyterian church and performed as a soloist as parts of shows for the cornell music clubs and a lot of assorted pageants and concerts.

the mintzes were heavily democrats. they are recorded as belonging to the democratic party, running democratic campaigns, being endorsed by the democratic party for office, helping to run democratic party machines, and even serving as a delegate to the democratic national convention. it should be noted that the ithaca daily news, for which lionel worked, is the democratic party mouthpiece of tompkins county.

they worked in local government, serving on various boards and commissions.

lionel and gustave were involved in the chartering of ithaca's brand new chapter of the american legion. it is possible that lawrence also was involved in the organization, but the clippings i have seen do not mention it.

they belonged to professional organizations and alumni organizations. they ran charity drives.

they belonged to the elks, the rotary, the royal arcanum, and the maccabees.

they were active on sports teams, and lionel was commissioner of the ithaca city baseball league.

they sang and acted in pageants, variety shows, and comedy routines. they gave lectures. one or two of them even appeared in silent films.

if you could join a thing, they joined it. if a thing was not available to join, they opened up a chapter of it or created a whole new club from scratch.

the mintzes were enmeshed in the fabric of their community.

live news!

cicadas!!!!

it's a brood II year, which means i have a chance of going somewhere i can see them.

i am waiting (im)patiently, checking the live map every day to see if there are reports of the emergence coming far enough north for me to go.

i figure i need them to come as far north as bennington sort of, so i can stay on a campsite down there.

but there's a map!


did i mention a LIVE UPDATING MAP????


WITH DAILY REPORTS OF SIGHTINGS???????


*hops up and down with excitement*

life in clippings: what the....?

ok. maybe you want to get out a pencil and paper so you can make a little diagram.

later on i will show you my diagram, but we are still a few days out from that.

i kept seeing articles in which harry mintz, attorney and teacher, of binghamton (NOT harry mintz, attorney, son of ben the clothing store owner) is a relation of ben.

and they all seem to be intertwined and i KNOW it's a close relationship just from the frequency these people overlap.

but i can NOT make sense of it.

ben's wife is named rachel and she was born in 1857.

harry's mother is named rachel and she was born in 1854.

harry has two brothers, hiram and jacob.

hiram, jacob, and harry are all buried with their mother (rachel) and father (ephriam) in binghamton.

ben is buried in syracuse.

ben's son aaron has a daughter named ruth who is a niece of hiram.

harry is ben's brother.

ben's children are buried in ithaca.



now who lives in the yellow house?



here's my working solution:

ben is buried in syracuse with his wife (1857 rachel) and mother. ben's mother is ephriam's FIRST wife. harry, hiram, and jacob are ben's HALF brothers, and ruth is hiram's GREAT niece.

i can't prove this puppy beyond all doubt, but it is the simplest explanation for the facts that i know.

life in clippings: everyday antisemitism

this has less to do with the mintzes and more to do with the time in which they lived.

stupid stinking anti-semitism isn't over, but among polite people it's at least not stylish so bigots mostly pretend not to be bigoted.

oh, did you think i was going to write as a neutral?

ha.

so anyway, i was looking at clippings that detail the donors to various charities and causes, and there are a LOT of examples where the mintzes are either performing for charity events, organizing charity events, or ponying up cash.

and a fair amount of cash, too.

but then i noticed a couple of disturbing items.

let's back up a little.

ok, let's back up a lot.

the jewish people have been sitting on the ugly end of systematic persecution for a LONG time.

so maybe we'll only back up to about 1820 when a specific wave of systematic violence and persecution against jews in russia was just getting rolling.

we'll just call those the pogroms.

in these years, a lot of russian jews emmigrated to the US and the UK. some of them were actively escaping, and some simply looked around them, noticed the future wasn't looking bright for jews in russia, and they packed up and left.

i'm making some guesses when i say that the mintz family arrived in america to escape the pogroms. what i know for certain is that they were russian, they were jewish, and they began arriving in the US in the late 1860s.

it might fairly be said that they were in fact escaping the pogroms because even if that was not their intent, it was certainly the outcome. the worst of the pogroms came after they were already here.

we know that many russian jews arriving in the US in these years were poor, but there is some evidence that the mintz family arrived with at least some of their wealth intact.

once again, i'm making some guesses based on the prosperity of the family even in that first generation.

they were wealthy enough to employ live-in servants and to send multiple children to cornell university. they "took cabins" on the lake and went on a great deal of vacations, many of which were reported in the newspapers.

by contrast my family, which arrived in the US from eastern europe starting in the 1880s has never achieved that level of affluence.

what i'm saying here is that these people were not a drain on the resources of the american economy.

so now we get to the part where i'm sitting here at my desk reading the clippings about the mintzes and of ithaca in those days and my search turns up a nice little article about the jewish new year.

it serves the purpose of telling people a little about the holiday and also informs the town that the stores in town owned by jewish families will be closed in observance.

the article seems harmless, but it does have a quality about it where jews are odd foreigners among us, even if we like them.

by itself, i would not have thought twice until i got to a 1905 article in the ithaca daily news about money being raised to help the victims of the pogroms and what really burns my butt here is in the headlines:

RUSSIAN JEWS AIDED 

BY ITHACA BRETHREN 

-------

NO OTHER CITIZENS SOLICITED 

----------

Members of Race Careful Not to, Ask 

Help of Christians, But Any Such 

Contributions Will be Gratefully 

Accepted—News Believes That 

Publicity Will Help On This Good 

Work Here. 

really? dafuq? i don't even know where to start. first of all,  jewish is not a race, nevermind the wrongness of  dividing people into races for any purpose other than description.

(newsflash for racial purity hatwipes: we're all interbreeding now, and it turns out we have neanderthal DNA, so we're not even species pure. get over it. isn't it nice that we come in such a wide variety of colors? you can select a mate to match your sofa!)

but anyway. we want to help people who are being brutalized and for some reason we need to take an apologetic tone deferential to christians that we are even asking? because only jews should be properly concerned with helping other jews? and christians should not be troubled by the request?

ugh. that is so wrong it makes my brain hurt.

happily, in a 1915 article about relief for russian jews (yes, still the pogroms), there is no such caution about being careful not to ask the christians. happily, many of the names on the list are christian people of ithaca.

there's still that feeling of "other", though, that i do not like. i know, it is very progressive and tolerant for its day. i know, in the day it is simply smashing for jewish families to be able to live and work and go to school with everybody else and be in the society pages and the institutionalization of "otherness" is not as bad as the institutionalization of oppression.

and everyone of the era seems to take part in a cheerful racism against all non-whites.

but still.

on a mintz-study note, although the mintzes show up on donor lists for just about every other cause, they are absent from the lists of donors to aid the russian jews. since they ARE russian jews, maybe they feel it is poor form to be connected with such a fund? maybe they are already contributing to this cause by helping out their own extended family? already paying to bring more jews out of russia?

i don't know.

often study of a thing raises more questions than it answers.

life in clippings: why?

it started out simple.

i wanted to look up a few things about a couple of guys whose headstones i happened to have passed on my way to meet some people on a saturday afternoon.

as people, we mark the graves of our dead. we list our dates of birth and death and our relationships and sometimes our accomplishments. there is something about us that wishes to be remembered and commemorated.

so it's a thing i do pretty often, when i'm near a cemetery with old graves: i take a few pictures of stones that catch my eye and i try to put together a small picture of the person's life.

i wanted to say here is lawrence m. mintz. he was in the army. he had a family. he lived here in ithaca.

but it turned out that there was a LOT of information available with just a little digging and a great deal more information available with a lot of digging, and when you collect enough fragments about one person and then one family and then the community they lived in, you learn a lot about not just how this one guy lived, but how people lived.

there's broad view history, and there's narrow view history. i like the narrow view. ithaca ny is a city i care about. you can maybe tell its story in a general way but it is made of individual people living in a community. the really interesting things about the city are expressed in the lives of its people.

and you can't tell the story of all of the people, but you can take some small samplings. you can build a larger general picture from the fragments.

i kept finding interesting things, so i kept digging. it tickled my brain like a puzzle.

i still do not know in what year the clothing store closed. i still do not know in what year rachel died, or if jay married or had children. i still do not know in what year ruby was born, or the anything about the other infant who died. i don't know which of aaron's daughters married jack, and which married sol.

and they are no kin of mine, yet they feel to me like more than accidental strangers. i have a great fondness for them and the story of their lives, and i want to tell you who they were.

i keep thinking of ways to try to answer one question, but then a lot of answers to questions i didn't ask pop up, and of course more questions.

i hope you are not bored to death with them, because i'm going to keep telling their story.

i am not sure yet how to tie the pieces together.